Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

12. Gregory Battcock, “Painting Is Obsolete,” reprinted in part III of this volume.
13. See, for example, Dore Ashton, “New York Commentary,” Studio International (March
1969); Hilton Kramer, “Art: Xeroxophilia Rages out of Control,” New York Times (11 April 1970);
Robert Hughes, “The Decline and Fall of the Avant-Garde,” Time (18 December 1972); Tom
Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975).
14. Lumping sympathetic and antagonistic critics together is one of the limitations of Gabriele
Guercio’s review of conceptualism’s critical reception, “Formed in Résistance: Barry, Huebler,
Kosuth and Weiner vs. the American Press,” in Claude Gintz, L’art conceptuel: Une perspective,
ex. cat. (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1989), pp. 74–81). Another limitation
is the way in which he, apparently naively, plays into the charge of simple self-indulgence levied
by critics like Kramer and Hughes when he defines conceptual art as a would-be artist’s rights
movement whose main accomplishment was to “defend the right to self-reflexivity and the freedom
to define art” for oneself.
15. For very different analyses of competing critical and aesthetic tendencies within American
and European conceptualism as a whole, see Joseph Kosuth’s distinction between “SCA” (stylistic
conceptual art) and “TCA” (theoretical conceptual art) in “1975,” and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s
distinction between the “aesthetic of administration” and the “critique of institutions” in
“Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,”
reprinted in part VIII of this volume. For more recent and comprehensive critical accounts
of the various tendencies that made up conceptual art, see Alexander Alberro, “Deprivileging
Art: Seth Siegelaub and the Politics of Conceptual Art,” Ph.D. diss. (Northwestern University,
Evanston, Ill., 1996), and his introduction to this volume. All of these accounts base their analyses
in New York. For alternative accounts that delineate various conceptualist approaches within
a perspective that includes work produced in Argentina and Brazil, see Mari Carmen Ramírez,
“Blueprint Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America,” reprinted in part VIII of this
volume, and my interview with Luis Camnitzer, published in part VII of this volume.
16. Lucy Lippard, “Postface,” reprinted in part V of this volume.
17. For an extensive study of Siegelaub’s accomplishments, see Alberro, “Deprivileging Art.”
18. Seth Siegelaub in Siegelaub and Michel Claura, “L’art conceptual” (1973), my translation,
published in part V of this volume.
19. Quoted by Hughes, “The Decline and Fall of the Avant-Garde.”
20. Robert Smithson, “Production for Production’s Sake,” reprinted in part V of this volume.
21. Robert Smithson interviewed by Bruce Kurtz in 1972, first published in The Fox, no. 2
(1975) and reprinted in Smithson, Collected Writings, pp. 264–265.
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